The Status Game (with Will Storr)

Will Storr talks about his book The Status Game with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, exploring how our deep need for respect and recognition shapes our behavior. The conversation delves into how we constantly judge others and compare ourselves to them, the pain of losing status, and the freedom of escaping judgment. Storr and Roberts discuss how status drives everything from workplace hierarchies to social media, and how aging can shift the games we choose to play. They also examine tribalism, moral outrage, and politics through the lens of status, suggesting that much of what we call morality or justice reflects our desire for recognition.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is October 16, 2025, and my guest is author Will Storr. Our topic for today is his book, The Status Game. Will, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Russ. It's good to be here.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  So, this book, Econ Talk listeners, will recognize the echo of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, my favorite quote being, "Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely." That is, we care about earning the respect of other people, and we like to matter, and we like to be admired, and we like to be, we like to earn that, honestly, if we can. But we sometimes fool ourselves. And, Will, you actually quote Adam Smith with a similar version of that quote, which is fun for me to see. But what this book

• 1:25Speaker 00

  is about, it's more than just the Adam Smith insight. It's about our perennial, constant desire to judge ourselves, judge others, and give ourselves a score in the game of life because of our status and how we're treated. So, talk about what you mean by "life is a game," and the status game in particular.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the thesis is that the conscious experience of human life is a story. You know, that's how we experience our life moment to moment with a kind of hero at the centre of this unfolding narrative. But the subconscious treats our lives in a different way. And so when I'm talking about life being a game, you know, that's what it's doing. It's, you know, there's a famous neuroscientist called Chris Frith that I quote in the book, who says that the brain treats your environment as a reward space and it draws you towards the things that you need and pushes you away from the things you don't need. And that's what the subconscious brain is constantly doing. And the story of life is we're telling a story and justifying and rationalising those movements to, you know, back and forth.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, the three big things that humans want is, you know, like all living things, we want to survive, obviously, and we want to reproduce. But in order to do that, humans have these other two very profound urges. The first one is connection. You know, we want to connect with people like us, which is not primarily the subject of this book, but equally important. And the second one is status. You know, we need to feel that we are being of value to other humans because we're this sort of collective, tribal, you know, highly cooperative ape. So we're highly motivated by signals that we are contributing to the, you know, the great cooperative game of human life. So that is a subconscious obsession.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You know, we need to feel that we are valued or respected or however you want to phrase it, that we have status. And when we don't feel like that, we immediately feel distress. And when we experience sort of low status in a chronic sense, we get mentally ill, we get physically ill. So the book is really arguing that status is not a want, it's a need. And then just extrapolating all the ramifications, the various ramifications of that.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  So let's talk a little bit about judgment. I went on a number of silent meditation retreats and on these retreats, you're not supposed to make eye contact. You're not supposed to speak to anybody for sure. You're not supposed to touch anybody. So if you see somebody crying or struggling emotionally, you're not supposed to comfort them. That's the role of the staff and the teachers. But even when you pass them in the hall, you're not supposed to catch their eye. You can't nod, you can't recognize them in any way. And when that first happened, I thought, when I was first told that was one of the ground rules, I was like, that's just the silliest. That's just, that's stupid, ridiculous.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  But after about a minute, three minutes, I don't know how long it was, I realized, after not looking at someone, I realized they weren't looking at me. And it was one of the most liberating experiences I've ever felt. I wasn't being judged. Oh, he's overweight, he's not attractive, his hair is funny, that shirt's wet, why do you wear that shirt? And I realized that we do that every second. And you know, part of the, the goal of that retreat was to be aware of judgment and how constantly we do that. And of course, judgment's really useful in all kinds of places, but it also comes at a cost.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  So talk about that, the role of judgment in our everyday life and also your own experiences. Having written this book and thinking about it, has it made you more sensitive to judging and being judged?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's so interesting about the silent retreat. Yeah, I hadn't thought of it like that. But, but yeah, so, so we, yeah, the brain has this, I mean, neuroscientists call it the status detection system. We have this always on technology that's continually assessing. Other people in terms of status, but also how other people are assessing us in terms of status. So, you know, I talk in the book, you know, you go into an elevator in a hotel and you're immediately judging people on how they're dressed, what floor they're getting off at, are they staying in a suite or are they staying in one of the lower floors? Who's the staff? You know, like you can't, you can't escape from the, the status game. And, you know, we've been playing, you know, lots of animals do this, you know, we're not

• 6:13Speaker 01

  the only animals that are interested in status, but, but, but, but we are, you know, especially good and especially sensitive to it. And it's functional, as I say, like, you know, so humans are, you know, a species of great ape. We're not like an ape, we are an ape, but we're unlike the other apes in a really important way, and that's that we're highly, highly cooperative. So we're kind of part ape, part ant. So, you know, the way that we solve the problems of existence are unlike the other apes, is we do it collectively. We, we form into groups and each member of the group knows what their role is and they know what part they play. And it's the group in humans that solve the problems. So, you know, that's whether it's a soccer team or a political party or a nation or an army, that, you know, that's what we do.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  We, you know, we, we, we solve the problem, the form of cooperative groups. And in order, and in order to make those groups functional, you need, you need a system of incentive and punishment, you know, you know, reward and punishment. And that's the status game, you know? So, so, so, so, you know, as I said earlier, we are deeply interested in how useful am I being to other people, you know? And, and, because that's what status is, it's, it's, it's a, it's a score of our, of our perceived value. And back in the days of the hunter gatherer tribe, when our brains, when all this was evolving, when our brains, you know, our human brains were evolving, the more, the more, the more useful you were to the tribe, the more pro-social you were, the more you

• 7:37Speaker 01

  put the tribe's interests before your own, the higher you would raise in status and, and the more food you'd get, the better food you'd get, you'd get safer sleeping sites, you'd get better access to your choice of mates, which of course, evolutionarily is extremely important, your children be treated better. So basically, it's this fundamental rule of human life is go for status. If you go for status, everything else gets better. And, you know, lots of, lots of those other things are directly plugged into survival and reproduction. So, so it's a fundamental importance.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Of course, the flip side is that you want to avoid a loss of status.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  So, you know, one of the more shameful.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Feelings that that I have experienced is being around someone who I think is not worthy of being around me, and therefore I don't want to associate with them because they're pulling down my status. And it's just, I had a remarkable moment, maybe about six months ago, I had a party at my house for some of my faculty, and a man came to deliver the fruit for the party, and he came late. So the most of the faculty were already there, and most faculty historically, in my experience, are really into status. It's it's an important thing. But I'm proud to say that my group here at Shalom College

• 9:00Speaker 00

  in Jerusalem, when this guy came to deliver their fruit, they it was in my house, by the way, they happily invited him in, gave him some of the food that was he was a he was an older man, and he was, he wanted a tip. It was clear that he was eager to to be taken care of in addition to whatever he was being paid for this delivery. And my faculty just embraced him. It was just I was so proud of that, because that is kind of rare. And I and, you know, they have PhDs, and of course, they have a lot of status, at least in certain circles. Others, not so much. But it just it's a beautiful thing. And I think, you know, one of the crueler things that we sometimes do as human beings

• 9:42Speaker 00

  is we reject or push away people that we think are not worthy of us on some illusory dimension, like education, with the thought that, oh, that's going to that's going to make me look lesser in somebody else's eyes. And it's not a rational calculation. I mean, one of the things you emphasize in the book, which I think is very powerful, is how unconscious or subconscious this is. And I think your book sensitizes one to that challenge, and which I think is very important.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. And as I say in the book, your status leaks. And so we want to be around higher status people than us because that because their status leaks out onto us. But it also goes the other way. And if we feel that we're, you know, around people who are lower status, then that makes us uncomfortable because that means that we we feel that that some of the status is leaking out. I mean, I just come from my CrossFit class, which is why my hair is wet. And, you know, that's full of

• 10:42Speaker 00

  I'm not impressed. I am not impressed at all.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, because because it's like, like, I've been going for two years, and I'm still one of the worst people. I'm one of the lowest status people in the gym.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  But Will, you do

• 10:54Speaker 01

  The big guys who are in their 30s and 20s. But it's always the old guys that gravitate towards me. And I think, why? And it's like, because you're one of them. These are your people. Accept it, you know, like, but yeah, it's, I always, especially after writing this, I always notice it at CrossFit, because it is like going into a place where I am fated to be always one of the lowest status people in that particular space. So

• 11:17Speaker 00

  But, but you do CrossFit, which makes me look like a bum. So I'm, I'm humbled that you're on my program. And I feel the lesser than I did a minute and a half ago.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  You wouldn't be happy to be seen half an hour ago, I tell you.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  It reminds me of when my wife and I about five years ago, went to see Jackson Brown, who I'm a big fan of. And she looked around at the concert, and she said, Well, a lot of these people look like my mom. And I said, Yeah, because they're old like us, you know, somewhat at least. It was not a young crowd. But that's you at the gym. I'm sorry to hear it, Will.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I had a similar experience. I think one of the, one of the sort of moments I really like, I realized I was getting old was, you know, I, my favorite band is the Afghan, called Afghan Wigs. And I remember going to see them in the nineties in London and, you know, in like the singer Greg Dooley was young and thin and handsome and the whole of the audience were young and thin and attractive. And I was there, you know, and then I went to see them again, you know, in my early forties and Greg was rather overweight and everybody in the crowd was old and overweight. I was still looking around like, God, you know, like what, what, like, we used to be cool and now we're just not like, like even on the stage, they're just not, you know, it's so. Age is cruel.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  It's just a good example, though, because it's, it makes your point, which you make in the book, which is, you know, if you can't win that game, pick a different one. You know, you're always looking for a place where we can be a bigger fish than we might otherwise be.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  But I think that's one of the, well, that's one of the liberating things is the understanding that, that, I, I, I think that the colloquial understanding of status is that, is that, is that life is just one big status game. It's just one monolithic game that you go up and down. But that's not how it is. It's, is that there are kind of effectively infinite status games. And, you know, I can go into CrossFit, I can go into CrossFit and be at the bottom of the rung, but then I can go into a different status game and, and, and, and not be there, you know, like 10 minutes later or half an hour later. So, so, so, so that's the great thing about life. And I, and I think that's the thing that, especially getting old. I mean, I've just turned 50, I'm not enjoying it. But, but, but it's the understanding that you, you just can't be playing those games of youth anymore. You can't be playing a status game that involves beauty anymore. Just don't.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Like, because you're gonna make a fool of yourself, you know. So, so, so, you, you, you know, but there are other games to play, you know, that, you know, that when you, when you're in your forties and fifties, you've got to have experience and expertise. And there, there are things that a 22 year old can't do that you can do.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So it's embracing that stuff and not falling again. We live in such a youth worshipping culture in the West, that, that, that, that can be hard for people. I mean, you know, it's hard for me, it's hard for lots of us as we get older.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Your hair still, still looks really good, though. Just, you know, and much better than mine. So, you know, I'm 71, so it's nothing to be proud of.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Are you? Oh, my God, you look amazing for 71.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Of course. Yeah, that's one of my status achievements.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Wow, amazing.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Let's talk about Ben Gunn, an example early on in the book, which is quite, quite, quite interesting about.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Illustrating how how status works.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Ben was a guy that I interviewed as a journalist quite a lot about ten years ago, maybe fifteen years ago, and I interviewed him because he was the, I think, the longest serving prisoner in the UK, you know, he'd been he'd been sent to prison as a teenager for losing his temper and killing someone accidentally, and he was literally sent down to prison wearing his school uniform, I think he was fourteen. And of course, this is a nightmare, you know, the phrase is that Her Majesty's pleasure, which is like an open ended sentence. And so he was there, and he, you know, initially, he tried to take his own life, he tried to starve himself to death, he tried, you know, all kinds of things, and that didn't work.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  But slowly, he sort of decided to, you know, fight against what he perceived as the kind of petty, kind of bullying tactics of the prison officers. And so he decided to study law, prison law and prison rules. And he got himself to the stage where he knew the, you know, the law better than the prison guards themselves, and became became known as, you know, the archetype of character, the kind of the prison lawyer. So whenever any prisoner had a problem, they would come to Ben, and Ben would help them, and, you know, cause a lot of problems, cause a lot of trouble, you know, write a lot of letters, you know, and he became, he developed a reputation as being somewhat of a difficult, well, not

• 15:57Speaker 01

  somewhat, a lot of a difficult prisoner. And so i- i- in their kind of infinite capacity for revenge, the prison authorities kept denying him parole, you know, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, because because he was just this, you know, such a troublemaker. And then what happened was that he fell in love, like a visiting teacher, English teacher, he fell in love with a visiting English teacher, and she fell in love with him, and they had this kind of affair, and somehow managed to have an affair in prison. And it got to the point where she said to him, look, Ben, you know, you're always up for parole, they're always turning you down, all you've got to do is just behave, just like spend a year not causing any trouble, and then you can be released. I've got a

• 16:42Speaker 01

  lovely cottage in the Cotswolds, you know, you can come and live with me and my cats like paradise. And the amazing thing was that he wouldn't do it, like he didn't, he didn't want to do it. And he had to kind of face the fact that You know, he didn't want to be released. Actually, what had happened was he'd become very high status amongst the prisoners in the prison. You know, when he walked down the corridor, people went, oh, my God, it's Ben Gunn. You know, he had this huge beard. He looked like a pirate, you know. And so, but when I met him, he had actually been released, and he was living in the lovely cottage in the Cotswolds, and it was lovely, and his partner was a wonderful person. But he was in the midst of what seemed to be

• 17:26Speaker 01

  a terrible breakdown. Like, you know, he completely collapsed, and, you know, in his own words, was that I knew who I was inside. I was someone, and out here, I'm nothing. I'm just an ex-con. And that really spoke to me quite profoundly about our need for status, you know, and how important it is, and how kind of really preeminently important it is, is that even in that absolute hell of the British prison system, he would rather be there and have his status than be outside and have freedom and the love of a good woman and have no status whatsoever. So, yeah, I thought that was just a very interesting story to begin the book.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, without any spoilers, there's a similar character in The Shawshank Redemption. It's, you know, when you script it in a movie, it seems a little heavy-handed, but this is a true story, and you bet the man. And the idea that we want to be loved in the Adam Smith sense of the word, he was loved by his wife, but that was not quite enough for him, at least relative to what the respect and admiration he had in that more restrictive environment. It tells you a lot about the human animal.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and romantic love, I would put under the category of connection. That's a separate thing. You know, that's different from the feeling that we are valued by the wider human community. I think that's what we're talking about when we're talking about status.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  So, we recently had Toby Stewart on the program, talking about his book, Anointed, which is in a similar vein. But there's an edge to his book, there's a little edge to yours, too, which we will get to, about the economic system, but.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  It was clear in talking to Toby, and it's probably in his book, I don't want to misquote him, so I'm just talking about at least the conversation, that being anointed, being given status by someone recognizing you, or choosing you, picking you out, and giving you the benefit of their elevated status, either from their success, or their beauty, or whatever it is, that's something sinister is too strong, but he doesn't like it, let's just leave it at that, which I get, I don't like, I mean, I'm more agnostic about it. But the theme of your book really is that it's just the way it is. We might not like

• 20:00Speaker 00

  it, we have social movements that rebel against it, they have not turned out so well. And you don't spend as much time on this in the book as you might have, but much of the book is saying, under the surface, and occasionally explicitly, this is the game. You might not like the rules, you may think it's unfair to you, but this is the world that you live in, because of your genetic endowment as a creature of the past.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  That's right. You can't not play the status game. It's impossible. You know, it really is impossible. It's in our brains, it's part of how we experience ourselves, and we experience the world. I mean, the nearest, you get to people, there are three really examples that I talk about in the book, of people who sort of fool themselves into believing that they've escaped the status game. And one of them is the Hikikamori of Japan, that the shut-ins, the people who find, you know, because Japan is a harsh status game, it's very judgmental, you know, very difficult work conditions, very strict kind of gender roles are enforced. And so there are generations of people that try and check out of there. And what happens to the Hikikamori is they end up spending, like, playing computer games,

• 21:18Speaker 01

  which is a proxy status game anyway. And then they usually just die alone, and people just, you know, there's a foul smell... They find their bodies. It's not good, you know, when you exempt yourself in the status game. And another group of people that fool themselves into believing that they've exempted themselves in status game are the Buddhists, which is complete fantasy. I mean, you know, Buddhists believe in a karmic system of, I think there are six realms of reincarnation and the idea is that you build yourself up to the, ultimately, you want to escape the game completely, but the top realm is wealth, luxury, splendor. I mean, it's basically the Donald Trump lifestyle is what these Buddhists are actually like. It's so incredibly status-based. Buddhism, the idea that they're somehow exempting themselves, and this is backed up in scientific studies too.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  There are these hilarious studies where they find that the better people become at Buddhism, the more highly they regard themselves as kind of spiritual, spiritual, you know, superiors to the people around them. And so it just doesn't work, this idea that mindfulness and meditation and Buddhism is this escape from, from the status game. And then the big story I tell at the end of the book as a way of summing up the whole thing is the experience of the communists who believed that there could be such a thing as the world of pure connection. I mean, that was their embrace, pure connection, with no status whatsoever. And of course, it ended up being an enormously hierarchical society. Sociology in the 1950s found 12 different social groups

• 22:47Speaker 01

  in the Soviet Union, you know, an insane cult of personality around Lenin, Stalin, Mao, which is all status, you know, demands for absolute reverence and subservience to the cause. So, you know, between the Buddhists and the Hikikamori and the communists, I think we can see that these various attempts to have been to escape status, they're catastrophic. Well, I mean, Buddhism isn't catastrophic. I mean, I think Buddhism is more comical in its self-delusion for me. But communism and Hikikamori, they are not good ways to organise your own life or the life of a. Of a country. So you can't, you just can't do it. And also, I would argue, why would

• 23:31Speaker 01

  you want to? Because, you know, because status is the source of a lot of personal pain for people. And that's what we think about a lot is, oh, my God, it's tough, it's hard. And it is, but it's also responsible for civilization itself, like without, without smart people being very deeply interested in winning the respect of their peers, you don't get technological advances, you don't get space travel, you don't get the internet, you don't get cities and the amazing, you know, art that we have in the world, you know, so, so, you know, I'm agnostic about, well, I mean, status is as good as it is bad, you know, in the book, I trace terrible things, including the Holocaust to status

• 24:13Speaker 01

  anxiety, but equally, you know, the invention of the iPhone, you know, that has its founding story in Steve Jobs insane status anxiety and his insane sense of personal competition with his rivals in Silicon Valley. So, so, so that's the human animal. And it is one of these things, like I've said, I don't think I say it in the book, but I've said it before and elsewhere, is that I find these conversations kind of ridiculous, you know, like we, 20 years ago, we were having conversations about is religion good or bad? Or is capitalism good or bad? Is status good or bad? I mean, it's so comical to want to feel we can reduce these incredibly complex systems of trade-offs into good or bad. I mean, they're highly

• 24:57Speaker 01

  complex phenomena, you know, religion is good and bad, capitalism is good and bad, status is good and bad. I mean, so, so, so, I really try and resist these very simplistic kind of analyses of these highly complex phenomena.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Well, I want to put in a good word for Buddhism. I'm not a Buddhist, but I certainly, I think many Buddhists will disagree with your assessment, but if we're lucky, we'll hear from them. I'm intrigued by it, by something that, you've just turned 50, so it's very relevant.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  You say in the book, and I think it's generally true, that you're never satisfied. You know, you think, oh, if I could make this achievement, it's usually related to money or career status or, you know, a certain title, then I'll be fine. And most of us aren't, and most of the time. There's a new title that we still yearn for. There are people, there's always people ahead of us, kind of incredible, and there are people behind us, which if you're really unhealthy, you can enjoy that, that you're above them. And it does cross your mind because you're a human being, part of your, part of the insight, I think, of your book.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  But for me, having reached 71, I feel like it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. Let me put it in a different way. The flip side of achieving things is grievance. You know, I'm not getting the respect I should get. I am not, I've not reached such and such an achievement, such and such a title, such and such an income. And instead of saying, well, it's me, it's usually, the conclusion is usually, it's them. You know, they're not giving me what I deserve. And there's a, an extraordinary story in the book, you don't have to go into the details, but it's a version of, do you know who you're talking to? Do you know who I am?

• 27:02Speaker 00

  And that cry, which never looks good, by the way, it's a, it's a, it's a sentence that a person should not utter in a world where many of our encounters get recorded. But it's, it's a, it's a plea. It's a, it's usually said in anger or outrage, but it's basically an incredible statement of insecurity because it's saying, you are not giving me the status I am entitled to. And that's a very, you know, it's a very human thing, but I'm just suggesting, I think as you, as you get older, or at least as I get older, I feel like The grievances don't bother me as much as they used to.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  So as you continue to do poorly at CrossFit as you age, well, there may be a consolation that some of the fire of injustice that we sometimes feel in this game, maybe will quiet down a little bit.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's very interesting. I mean, it's reassuring and comforting. I like what you're saying. So I tried to write, I wanted to write about this in the book because I had an instinct that as we get older, some of these urges will lessen. And I did research it, but the evidence was so inconsistent, I decided not to write about it. And so I was looking specifically about the effect of retirement because I think retirement is, you know, you're removing yourself from the status games of life. And so is retirement good or bad? And so the evidence is mixed and it seemed to be that if you choose your retirement, it's good. But if you kind of feel forced into retirement, it's bad. So it just felt a bit like, ugh. So I had an instinct for what you were saying was true and I wanted to argue it.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  But the only reason I didn't, because I couldn't find the evidence to stand it up. But I do appreciate what you're saying and I instinctively, I hope it's true as well because it's a lovely thought. The other thing that I will say, which I think is very, you know, which isn't in the book because it's in my more recent book, is this sense that we don't have the status that we deserve, I think is fairly universal. And in story terms, it's part of the archetype of the underdog. So when you're reading a story like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or whatever, Star Wars or Hunger Games or, you know, whatever it might be.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Very often you've got this underdog character. Underdogs are universally identifiable. Every culture has stories about underdogs. And so underdogs tend to be low status characters that are deserving of higher status. And I think that's the reason why we love underdogs so much, why we identify with them, because that's us, that's me. And my guess is that's part of our psychology, because it keeps us pushing for more. I deserve more, I deserve more, I deserve more. And I think especially as we get into middle age and some of the optimism bleeds away and some of the realities of life kind of leak in. I think you're right, that optimism and that fire turns into grievance. Like, I feel that often.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Every writer I know feels that, no matter how successful they are, without exception. It's not fair, it's not fair. And I do feel like it's, my instinct is just part of basic human cognition. We always feel like we are deserving of more status. And it keeps us pushing on and keeps us pushing on.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting. You mentioned, you know, Harry Potter. I was just thinking, when you mentioned underdog, I was thinking about Oliver Twist. So both those stories are about orphans. And it's actually kind of frightening how many children's stories about orphans. And I've always found it disturbing as a parent to read stories to my kid about, or kids about orphans. It seems like a very traumatic thing to put in the face of a child. But I think there's a part of it I didn't appreciate that you're highlighting, which is, an orphan is really, has no status. You know, their parents are gone, unless they've inherited an immense amount of money.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  But in all these gripping underdog stories, the kid is not only missing the guidance of the parent, they're missing the income of the parent, but most of all, they're missing any status that the parents have. You know, if the parents are well off, or they're successful, or they're admired, they're gone. And so the kid, who normally would be able to stand on the shoulders of the parent in some dimension, has nothing. And they're put into the orphanage, they're put into, you know, the relative who doesn't, who hates them, their cosette in Les Mis. And that underdog is...

• 31:59Speaker 00

  You're right, they are, they have a grievance. Their, their situation is not in line, it's not fair. And so it bothers us and we root for them.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we identify with that feeling. I think it's a fundamental thing. We identify with that feeling of, I should have more status than I do. I think it's, it's, it's, it's a very, very common feeling amongst humans. And you can see why it's functional because, because it keeps us pushing on for more and more and more.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Now, slightly against my theory that as you get older, you get more mellow about this, is a story you tell about Paul McCartney. And I'd never heard this, I think it's a fact, that later in his life, he, in some situations, reversed the order of the songwriting credits. And, you know, I've had Ian Leslie on the, Ian Leslie on the program talking about McCartney and Lennon. And I, I have a much greater appreciation for McCartney and Lennon than I had before I read his book. But this is, I don't know how, how, how to talk about it.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  It's, there's a, if it's, if there's not more to the story, it's, it's petty. But it's also pitiful. There's, it's such a dramatic example of the insatiable desire that we're talking about. Tell, tell what happened there?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, so I was told this, I was tipped off about this by a, you know, Beatles fanatic. When I told, there was a journalist, a music journalist, when I was telling them I was writing a book, I should write about Paul McCartney with this songwriting thing. And I was like, what do you see? Well, he said, oh, well, he went through a phase of, because, so, so the story is that when Lennon and McCartney started writing together, they had just had an agreement that, that all the songs be credited to Lennon McCartney. No matter who wrote what, it would just say Lennon McCartney. So that was fine. But then at some point with Paul McCartney, it became not fine, this is later in his career. And he, he, he started thinking, well, why does Lennon's name come first? It's not fair, like, my name should come first. And there were, there were various meetings about this. I think a lot of them were, some of them were after Lennon died because, because Yoko Oden was involved.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And she was like, actually, she said, absolutely not, you can't do this. And then so what he started doing is when he would do live albums where they would, where they would cover. Beatles songs. He would flip the names. So it was McCartney Lennon, McCartney Lennon. And then there was a threat of legal action from Yoko Wobbe. So I mean, the reason I love this story is because, as you say, like, so two things really. So one is Paul McCartney is famously like a really nice guy. Like, he's not like Kanye West, like lunatic, or Taylor Swift, who's, you know, very, who's seen as, you know, sort of savagely interested in status. He seems like a really nice guy. Like, no one's got a bad word to say about McCartney, really.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  And he's got some status. He's got money. He's one of the most famous people on the planet.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. You can't imagine, really, a person with more status than Paul McCartney, who's alive at the moment, really. Like, he's beloved. He basically helped invent popular music, like, like, like the songs that he wrote. And yet, like, and so I just thought that was a, I've got a bit more of a kind of, maybe empathetic view than you. Like, I don't think it's, it is petty, but I think it's deeply human.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Oh, I agree.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Like, it's deeply human. And I think it just shows you that, you know, and as I say in the book, the one study that sort of popped into my mind when I think about this, it might have been in the same chapter, was when they were trying to figure out the difference between power and status. Like, is power and status the same thing? And the answer is it isn't. You know, power is about being able to control resources. And actually, when you, when you test people's desire for power, unless you're a particular personality type, like a, maybe a Trumpian, or a whatever, personality type, people's desire for power very quickly wears out, because with power comes responsibility and hassle and stress. And it's slow, God, you know, so, but, but, but when they test people's desire for status,

• 36:10Speaker 01

  it never runs out. Like, it never stops. And the interesting thing about status is it is not to say that everybody, everybody's walking around thinking, I want to be the king, I want to be the number one. Most people don't. They're quite happy to be above average. But it's, but it, but it's, but it's about ratcheting up. You go up a little bit in status, then you want a bit more, and you want a bit more, and you want a bit more, and you want a bit more. And that never stops. It never, it never stops. I mean, I, I agree with you. Like my, I say in old age, like I, I, older, older age, I should say, I'm sure it, it, it wears down. And good, like you don't want to be 71 and trying to compete with a 21, 21 year old, for God's sake. You know, you, you, you want to take it easy a bit, but, but, but, but, but, um, but, but yeah, it never really stops.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  You, you, you know, there's, there's, I don't think it ever comes, comes a point in your life where you're quite happy to be seen as the lowest status person in the room.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  So now we're going to get the Taylor Swift fans writing us too with the Buddhist.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And the Buddhist Taylor Swift fans are going to really be upset with you, Will. But I, I want to say one thing about McCartney, you know, it's,

• 37:14Speaker 00

  it's a constant issue in academic life. When you have multiple authors, which is, which is increasingly the case in, in modern academic life, especially in science. So usually the, the, um, the norm is it's alphabetical order.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  But, you know, if you're, my last name is Roberts, so that's cruel. It's not fair. Uh, and Lennon McCartney is in alphabetical order. Now my, my guess is that maybe they flipped a coin, uh, but maybe they just decided, well, alphabetical order. In economics, what happens, which I think is, I don't know, there's, there's a humor to it. It, it, people will write that the order of the authors was, was chosen randomly. Lest you think that the first author is the more important one, or the one who did more of the work. Including if it's in alphabetical order, because you want to make it clear.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  Cause maybe you don't know that it was chosen as alphabetical order. So they often in the acknowledgements will say, which is really strange, that it was alphabetical order, or it's random, or we toss, you know.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Academics, obviously, you know, the joke is, uh, the, the, the fighting is so petty because the stakes are so small, you know, here, here's this journal article that's 11 people are gonna read and you're worrying about that you're second, really? But I guess, you know, you gotta fight over Scott, you got, it's the game.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  That's the game. Like, like another one of these studies, which always sticks in my mind is about the orange juice where, where it was back in the seventies, they did a study where they poured lots of people glasses of orange juice and one person got slightly less orange juice than everybody else. And, you know, reliably, that person became distracted and obsessed and was thinking about the orange juice. And because that's what, that's what we're like as people, you know, we're like as human beings, we, you know, everything is a symbol of state, everything can be a symbol of status. And, and we are, we are deeply interested in our, our relative status because it, as I said at the beginning of the chat, it plugs directly into our ability to survive and reproduce. So it's, you know, it's extremely important to us.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  So you take some, um, I was gonna call them cheap shots. That's not nice. You attacked neoliberalism at one point in the book, uh, which is a phrase I don't like. But, uh, what you mean by that is the, uh, I would call it the intellectual currents that culminated in the election of Reagan and Thatcher and, and pushed the United States and Germ, and Germany, sorry about that, the United States and the United Kingdom toward a less regulated, less regulated, smaller government. Now, I would argue it wasn't really

• 40:07Speaker 00

  much smaller, but let's put that to the side. I'm, I'm curious why, why you believe, I'll, I'll take the simple example of, uh, that the, after the, this change, people got more, fill in the blank, greedy, self-centered, could be true, but, but it's kind of hard to blame it on that intellectual current, just like, I mean,

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Communism couldn't wring the inequality out of the human experience. In fact, it may have made it worse. Do you really think the those intellectual currents, which I think failed, by the way, I'm sympathetic to them. As my listeners know, you might not know that. I don't think they had much success, but but you give them a lot of weight in changing how we look at ourselves as individuals rather than more collectively oriented. Do you really think that had much of an effect on the status game?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Defend that.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  So the human brain is always asking the question, who do I have to be in this place in order to earn connection status and to just connect with people and to, you know, to to rise? And so, so, you know, with the, you know, with the rise, and I you don't like the phrase, but but when I was doing my research into this for my previous book, Selfie, I saw that lots of economists would argue that neoliberalism doesn't exist. I was aware that there was debate, but but, but, yeah, as I say, it's this idea that we remove things like, you know, regulation, it was the destruction of the unions, it was, you know, in the UK, it was privatization of industry, it was selling all the council

• 41:55Speaker 01

  houses, it was unleashing, you know, you know, dropping, you know, regulations on the on banking, which some of those regulations directly led to the global financial crisis in 2008. So there were all these measures that Thatcher and Reagan brought in to basically increase competition. That was that that was the goal. And so I'm intrigued that you said that they didn't actually do that because because that that seems to be a surprising claim, but you're an economist and I'm not.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  You're the first person who's ever said that, Will, to me in my life. Most people just say, oh, he does. Why would an economist understand this? But I want to be before. Well, you carry on, I'll I'll come back and add a footnote.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  So, I mean, really, so that chapter you're talking about is a is a brief summary of a much larger argument to make in my previous book, which is called Selfie. So I look quite deeply into that there. And so I think what even your viewers and listeners who aren't economists can appreciate, if you look at how the culture changed between the 60s and 70s and 80s, you know, as I said in selfie, you know, in 20 years, from 1965 to 1985, we went from, you know, screw the man in inverted commas, to greed is good. I mean, there was there was an enormous change in the culture of the West into how we into our conception of what a hero was, into our conception of what good and bad

• 43:24Speaker 01

  is, into our into the way that we played our status games. And I feel that it's, you know, and that times perfectly with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and all the things that, you know, we can describe as neoliberalism, which is the increasing competition. So, so, you know, this is extraordinary quote from Margaret Thatcher when she was elected, where she said, she said, economics is the project, but the object is to change the soul. And so my argument in selfie is that if you look at the psychology, that's what happened. I mean, there was an amazing study by Jean Twenge where she looked at babies' names and how they suddenly changed in the early 80s.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  So up until the early 80s, forever in the UK and the US, people would just name their children ordinary names like George, Alfred, Barbara, whatever it might be. And then starting in the early 80s, people started to give their children unusual names because they wanted, in her phrase, to stand out and be a star. So all this stuff, this increasing competition seemed to ramp up, you know, our kind of state of individualism, ramp up our state of wanting to stand out. There was a huge study of levels of perfectionism, which found that beginning in the 1980s and rising up through into the early 2000s, perfectionism rates soared in individuals

• 44:52Speaker 01

  in the UK, in Canada and in the US. So psychologically, there's a huge amount of evidence, and there's more too, that we changed radically as a people in the 1980s. And those changes mirror perfectly this kind of Thatcher-Reagan project of

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Decreasing the collective self and increasing the individualistic competitive self.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  So that's, that's my thesis.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Well said. You know, I don't agree with it, but that's okay. I, I'll give you my take and then you can,

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  You can have at me. Uh, I don't mean to suggest that, that, that those two politicians achieved nothing.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  Uh, I, they did deregulate some, although actually in America, it started ironically with Jimmy Carter, who was Democrat. Uh, it started in the late seventies and Alfred Kahn, uh, was his chief economic, one of his chief economic advisors on, on deregulation and it, it introduced competition into industries that, that were, um, making lots of money at, at consumers' expense because they were protected. And I just, I have trouble seeing that as an, uh, an encouragement of self-interest or self-ishness.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  You know, the fact that, that truckers or airlines, and I'm talking about America. UK is a little different because of the changes and more in, in labor situations and, and a lot of things are different in both places, obviously. But the main argument I want to make on the other side is that in my ideal world, and I'm not going to speak for Ronald Reagan, I don't know what he actually, or Thatcher, what they had in mind. But for me, the, the redemption of the soul to take the, the Thatcher quote seriously was about devolving responsibility away from the collective, the state.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Toward not the individual so much as the voluntary, that, that we would associate with each other through what is sometimes called civil society to take care of each other. Now, in certain situations, that's a myth. It's not possible. I think it's very hard to rely, say, and you can talk about, you can debate whether it's good or bad, but it's hard to say create a welfare state voluntarily. There, there would be charity under a, if, if welfare really disappeared. But, you know, my, my other side of this debate is that I don't think Thatcher or Reagan were very successful in dismantling the welfare state. A lot of people was, you know, claim that. The more interesting question for me is the cultural change. And, and we can.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Debate where it came from, but I do think we are more self-centered and see ourselves over this period of, say, let's say, the last 30 or 40 years as more of a brand, a more transactional sense of self, that we don't see our role in the collective or our community as being as important. And I think it's a really deep question why that might be, if it's indeed true. But I don't think people are more selfish. And I think, you know, people chose exotic names because it's fun and a lot of norms and cultural restrictions

• 48:19Speaker 00

  dropped away over this period, which most of us think are a good thing, right? So it's, as you said earlier, it's complicated. It's good and bad.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think most people would accept that the 80s, I mean, you know, like, look at pop culture in the 80s. You had, you know, Whitney Houston, "The greatest love of all is the love of the self." You had, you know, Madonna's "Material Girl." You know, those kind of Reagan-Thatcher values became, it changed the way that we, I mean, you know, maybe it's just storytelling, maybe it's just that Reagan and Thatcher got to set the kind of narrative tone of the culture, in a similar way that Donald Trump is now and, you know, things are kind of moving. They call it a vibe shift these days, don't

• 49:06Speaker 01

  they? But yeah, I hear what you're saying and I bow to your superior kind of depth of knowledge as an economist, but I would still, I still think it's remarkable that at the same time these economic changes were being made, we had

• 49:27Speaker 01

  A kind of identical change in the character of the Western self, like we changed alongside, along with it.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and my answer to that would be, I think the story that people tell typically about Reagan at that was a bit of a caricature.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  And that while I bemoan the death of many collective things that we used to achieve as human beings, I also, as you do, recognize that sometimes collective action gets, has its own destructive side. So it's a bit of a trade off between freedom and social norms and government legislation, not just norms that's going on here. It's a very, very interesting

• 50:17Speaker 00

  phenomenon. The last 60 years, the amount of cultural change over the last 60 years, which has been driven by, in our era, the recent era, obviously, social media and the iPhone, and you know, the smartphone. Before that, it was driven, I think, by the birth control pill and a bunch of economic change that came from all kinds of places. But it's hard to know. I don't want to be, I really appreciate it. I'm touched by your willingness to elevate my status because I'm an economist. As I said, it's so rare. It usually drops me down.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  And in a social gathering, no one will concede superiority or respect for the economist because it's their field, because-

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Even when they're talking about the economy.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not. No, because they're in the economy to that person, that other person. I have a job. I work. I have income. I know all I know about this. And they might be right, by the way. I don't want to overstate any of my quote superior knowledge. Okay, I want to ask a different question, a different kind of challenge, which is-

• 51:33Speaker 00

  There's a related phenomenon that I think I didn't understand. You want to subsume tribalism to some extent under the status game. And I want to keep them separate.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  So tribalism is a lot like status. It is deeply ingrained in our makeup, our psychological makeup. We're very hardwired for both. But I think of them as two separate things. But you pull them together. Make the argument there. What are you trying to say?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Well, we play the status game on two different levels. So individual status is important to us, but also group status. So part of our identity, you know, there's a huge literature in psychology, social identity theory, very popular at the moment, which sort of explores how our identity is made up of our group memberships. And so, yeah, I think it's very well established, not only in psychology, but in neuroscience, that we are, that we are, yeah, that we, one source of our status is in our individual achievements, but also the wins of our group matters deeply to us. And to see that, you've only got to go to an English football match.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  And you see how unbelievably deeply people care about their team, who they don't actually play for, you know, winning or losing. You know, you see grown men in tears when their team loses some important, important match. So, yeah, that's why I, I mean, in psychology, that's not a controversial position, that group status, you know, we suffer from group narcissism. There was that hilarious study where they asked, I forget, like, you know, 20, 30 different people from 20 different countries to add up the percentage of how much their nation had contributed to world history. And I forget the actual percentages, but people were coming up with like 300 or 400%.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  You know, like, so people, you know, there's that concept also of group narcissism, which I think is really interesting because... There's a social kind of restriction on us claiming status for ourselves as individuals, but there is one for our groups. We're allowed to be very boastful and claim enormous amounts of status on behalf of our groups. And that's nationalism, that's, you know, that's the Swifties. So, yeah, that would be my position. And I think the position of lots of people in the psychology.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  No, I like that. And I think I tend to think of it, and I think maybe I'm looking at it wrong, maybe it's just status. I tend to think of it as injustice, that we have this sort of innate

• 54:21Speaker 00

  measuring of injustice. And when something is, say, untrue, and we feel there's been a wrong, that we get agitated and angry, especially if it's about our group. And I always think of it as simply, you know, my group's not getting what it deserves. But it's probably status. It's probably the, my, I'm here in the Middle East, I'm here in Jerusalem. It fascinates me that there's an immense amount of debate in the history of the Palestinian issue about what

• 55:01Speaker 00

  happened in, say, 1947 or 1948. Now, in a certain, 47 being the UN partition and 48 being the invasion of Israel by its neighbors, and then what happened after that is very much up for grabs, depending on what facts you report. We've talked about this on the program before. But what I'm, without going into whether which side has a better case, the intensity with which that 77-year-old issue gets debated, I always think about it as being a justice issue. You know, my side, with either one, is not getting the respect it deserves. And I always think, yeah, so I have angst,

• 55:43Speaker 00

  I have anger, I have outrage. But it really is partly about my side is higher status, is not getting the status it deserves, either.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think justice and truth. Truth in inverted commas is downstream from status in the sense that every group, like, like, like it or not, truth is local. Like, you know, the Zionists in Israel have one truth and the Palestinian, you know, Palestinians have another truth and they both equally believe their truth would be the truth. And especially against things like moral trees, because really, there's no such thing as a moral truth. You can't find, look at a moral truth under a microscope.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  We think we have one, most of us, for our side, whatever side it is, even if it's just rooting for Tottenham.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  So all of these things, we use it, we use as symbols for the status of our group. And that's, I mean, that's what you see in this recent cultural thing we've had in sort of cancel culture and, you know, woke-ism in inverted commas. It's that whole business of, I, I demand that you sign up to the truths of my group. And if you don't sign up to the truths of my group, then I'm going to attack you. And that, and it's an attack on your status. I'm going to remove you from your positions. I'm going to, I'm going to destroy your reputation. Da, da, da, da, da. So I think that's how it works. And I think, you know, group versus group status competitions can be absolutely savage. And, and yeah, I really think that,

• 57:08Speaker 01

  as I said, truth and justice is downstream from status. Ultimately, it's about the status of groups.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that that makes a lot of sense. I want to close by talking, at the end of the book, you talk about some, you give some advice about how to move in the modern world in this status game. The one rule that you suggest, which I found most provocative and interesting, is you summarize, you say, reduce your moral sphere. What do you mean by that?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  So this was very much a reaction to, I mean, I wrote this status game during lockdown, during the whole, you know, it was, it was a very feverish time in the culture wars. And it was just that sense of, I think we're spending too much time thinking about other people's moral behavior. You know, it's that, it's that sense of moral surveillance of other people. It's all about status, that stuff. It's all about, are you on my side or are you not on my side? Are you a source of status for me in my group? Or are you a threat to the status of me in my group? And Just the feeling that that brings a lot of hatred and a lot of aggression and a lot of stress to other people, but also to the self. It's not nice to live in that world of never being off your phone, judging other people, getting angry at other people,

• 58:30Speaker 01

  stressing out about other people's views. And just the belief that reducing your moral sphere in a sense of trying to hone it down just to think more about your own moral behavior, rather than obsessing about the moral behavior of others, felt to me like a probably a fundamentally good thing that most people should try and pursue.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  It's interesting, because in Judaism, if you see someone, if you are suffering, if you've had bad things happen to you, you're encouraged to do some soul searching and ask yourself whether you've maybe earned this, right? A very dark and troubling idea, but sometimes productive. But you're not supposed to do that with other people, right? If you see someone else suffering, you're not supposed to say, boy, that person must have done something terrible. You're supposed to be agnostic and view that as possibly just bad luck. You're

• 59:38Speaker 00

  not supposed, and you're definitely not supposed to investigate their soul on their behalf and say, oh, I know why that's happening to you because you, whatever. So you should be, you should distance yourself from the suffering of other people as a causal event, but you should use it for yourself as a way to become a better person. So it's a really, it's a similar idea to what you're suggesting. And I, I think in these troubled times that we're in, you know, with social media putting this kind of judgmental urge on steroids, it's, seems like really good advice you're giving.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Good. Well, thank you, Russ. I appreciate it. And thanks for engaging so thoroughly with my book. I really appreciate it. And I've enjoyed our chat very much. Thank you.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  My guest today, same here. My guest today has been Will Storr. His book is The Status Game. Well, thanks for being a part of E Town Talk.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.